Diary Entries

open is closed

'Done' being relative and everything...a word of warning, there is a crash bug that I can't seem to track down. I just have no clue here. Something related to drawing with GL_QUADS...the game will just freeze up. A force-quit works though ;D.

I interpreted the theme pretty abstractly I guess but it is there, I swear. All in all I'm proud of open, my second game, though obviously there's a lot of room for improvement. Enjoy (if that's the right word).

what's 'gameplay'?

I knew from Ludum Dare the other weekend that I would need at least 24 hours to make my PyWeek game (since I only managed 16 the weekend of LD, and another 8 later in the next week). I don't think I've quite managed that so far...but with some time tomorrow I think I can get there!

Having squashed some absolutely fiendish programming bugs, such as spelling basic words of English wrong, my concept is coming together. It isn't fully there but I have something to work with I think.

#1: flocking

I've had less time than I thought this week, but I am making progress!

It doesn't look like much (this may be a trend this week) but I'm pretty happy as I wrote my first flocking algorithm (thanks to the excellent tutorial by Conrad Parker, based on Craig Reynolds work). The routine is really cool in that it's built up from small components, so it's fun to play with by adding and subtracting things.

Of course there are a few sticking points I'm keeping my eye on, but hopefully won't have to worry about too much. Currently performance is OK, and my laptop definitely isn't new or top-of-the-line -- if things do start to drag I have a vague plan to use NumPy and the Doom inverse square root function ;). Second I haven't quite nailed collision avoidance in combination with flocking. I'm just using rectangle collision and under certain parameters of the flocking routine, the sprites still collide. So I'm not sure how to deal with that -- except by tweaking the parameters of the flocking ;).

Hoping to work on some audio tonight. My concept with this is not that ambitious (about the same as my Ludum Dare entry), but I'd like to get something more complete done by Saturday.